Trying to reduce the divide between culture and science, this article follows the producer
of popular records, as an interface between music and its market. Like the innovator
when he does not obey scientific, technical, and commercial reasons in succession, but
reshapes them all together through a double task of giving its form to the product and
the interesting people within it, the producer represents the public to the artist and the
music to the media. First in a local scale, then in larger and larger ones, alone with the
singer, in the studio, and into the media, this sociology of the intermediary shows the
producer experimentally organizing, as in a laboratory, a complete production-consumption cycle. Success is then not the mysterious leap to the public, but the last
extension of an equation into which the public has been incorporated in many forms from
the very beginning.
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